Smithy

Er, I opened the package. Here is a sample of the contents: Bad idea. What a way to go.

40-mile bicycle ride today, with a picnic at the ~2/3 point. Yesterday was rainy and gave me a chance to play with bread baking; today we had tuna salad sandwiches as a result. I'm really quite chuffed about the bread, although there's still plenty room for improvement. My only regret today is that I washed and bagged...and then forgot to pack...the lettuce.

I had a rainy day in which to mess around with two different bread formulas: the white bread sandwich loaf from Peter Reinhart's Craftsy class and my attempts at developing a sourdough olive oil and rosemary loaf. Amongst the other variables, I'm trying to get size and shaping right. Reinhart says that 3 oz. is the right size for, say, a hamburger bun. I keep thinking it should be easy to cut and shape uniformly. So far, it isn't uniform for me. Two different formulas were divided into loaves and rolls. The rolls varied from 3 to 6 oz in mass, and the loaves were about a pound each (the white bread loaf collapsed and isn't in the photo). The oven doesn't get as hot as I'd like, and the crusts aren't as brown or crisp as I'd like, but I'm basically happy with the results. The other human in the household is ecstatic: we've finally established that he prefers a soft crust, and my attempts at a crisp crust are easily overdone for his tastes. The darker brown gloss is due to an egg wash, but all crusts were soft. I still need to work on timing, shaping and temperature, but I'm really very pleased! Our picnic lunch today was quite satisfactory...except that I forgot the lettuce. :-(

Thanks for that information. Next question: what is kelp like as a food? I think of it as this wavy buoyant tangly sea vegetable that terrified me as a child. (Now I can appreciate its value in the ecosystem, as long as I don't try to swim near it.) Does it taste and feel like any land vegetable we could identify in North America? Salty? Firm and crunchy, like celery? Slimy, like okra? Rubbery? Your photo suggests, say, onion necks.

Cass Lake, Minnesota: a town of about 770 people and, at this time of the year, many additional campers and fisherfolk. For a town of its size, it has an impressive grocery store. I went in to pick up packages of this season's wild rice. Product demonstrator cast the line: "Hello, have you had your Oreos today?" "No," I said, struggling to remember when I last had eaten an Oreo. Has it been in this decade? This century? Not that I'm opposed to them, mind, except for the calories. She set the hook: "They have a dozen new flavors. Want to try some?" She had samples of half a dozen new cookie flavors: all with the traditional chocolate or vanilla wafers, but the cream/creme filling was different. There were vanilla wafers with lemon. Chocolate wafers with a raspberry/strawberry combo. Chocolate with peanut butter. Chocolate with mint. I tried all that she had. Untested but visible were variations for folks who want to change the wafer/filling ratio: on the one hand they had triple sandwich cookies with three wafers and two layers of filling; on the other hand they had single wafers with a layer of cream/creme, the whole lot coated with chocolate. Think Mystic Mint Meets Oreos. She reeled me in: "See if you can guess the fillings." In almost all cases I could get them - they really did taste as advertised - but one confounded me. "It looks like confetti in the filling," I said. I liked it, both because and in spite of its too-rich back-of-the-throat sweetness. I couldn't place it. "Most of us love these until we're about 30 years old," she hinted, "and then we want nothing more to do with them." Aha! My purchase. The cookies have that rich sweet flavor of a fully-loaded birthday cake with frosting. I'm not sure I dare open the package.

As someone who's read the essays and recipes in a draft, I very much want to see them get out for more people to enjoy. I think this book deserves to be published.

That's an interesting way to cut lamb. Is it half a vertical cross-section, including a couple of ribs? How are the kelp knots used in a dish: garnish or major element?

I do. Our household ate white bread (never Wonder Bread, because it was too expensive; we had Rainbo Bread instead) but when my grandparents came to visit from Fresno we pulled out all the stops: Roman Meal bread, and half-and-half for Papa's coffee.I think Toliver and I must have gone to school in the same time and region; his lunchroom experience sounds very much like mine.

My rotisserie experience is limited to the rotating thing over our gas grill. We don't try to regulate temperature; it's high heat (for chicken) all the way until done. Based on that limited experience, I'd try first to go with high heat; if the internal temperature didn't come up enough I'd finish with a lower temperature. Your kitchen looks wonderful. I'd be very pleased to come help you experiment. It might take many tests.

I've always been a Hellman's/Best Foods fan (except for making my own), but will have to spring for some Duke's to see what the fuss is about - or pick some up when we get south this fall. I'd never thought about adding MSG to my own. Sounds like a nice addition.

Who cares about marbling? They look delicious! (I'll be glad to take your rejects.)

I had the pleasure last Monday of visiting an offshoot of the St. Paul Farmers' Market, this particular offshoot being in the town of Savage. What a fine time we had! The majority of vendors are from the Hmong immigrants, and if I lived in the area I'd be doing more serious exploration of Southeast Asian cookery to take advantage of the produce. "Sweet red onions" was one of the more familiar but still interesting items. "How sweet?" I'd ask. "Are these like Vidalia or Walla Walla onions?" They didn't know. They're just sweet red onions. Of course I had to buy some. Here's my haul: The sweet red onions are very pretty when cut. They don't have the usual bite that I associate with red onion, but they aren't insipid. I had a tough time deciding whether to take those cute little eggplants in the direction of curry or stir fry. Given the bottle of sesame-ginger salad dressing cluttering our refrigerator from a party last week, I went the stir fry direction. The dressing was too sweet on its own (for my tastes) but not a bad basis for a stir-fry sauce, with extra ginger and some soy sauce. Eggplant, ginger, carrots, onions and a few other odds and ends made for a tasty, but less-than-photogenic dish. The culture clash came with this rice, picked up at yet another market at our current stop: This is wonderfully fresh and flavorful: nutty and fluffy, and an excellent complement for the dish even if the cuisines are an ocean and continent apart.

2015: * Shelby (2015):--The Everlasting Garden...Canning...Canning...Canning: August 10 - 17, 2015

I'll get in a last word of thanks and admiration. Your schedule this week would have been strenuous enough without having to document and write about it all; you went an extra mile or three . Speaking as someone who has trouble talking and cooking at the same time, I'm especially impressed. I've picked up some nice tips and recipes this week, seen some great photos, and thoroughly enjoyed the visit. Many thanks for bringing us along!

Your sizzling eggplant looks lovely and delicious, but raises the same question I face when I fry eggplant: how much of that oil is left after frying the eggplant, and what do you do with the oil afterward?

I've been to a PF Chang restaurant once, maybe twice, and enjoyed it. I think I picked up one of their frozen dinners on the strength of that experience and enjoyed it well enough. Haven't tried their frozen egg rolls, but maybe I will.

You make enchiladas look so easy! Every step you mentioned (salsa, roasting, marinade, sauce) sounds small, but I manage to make a huge production of it whenever I try. Kudos to you. I'm a flour tortilla person as well. :-) Kudos also on making jelly from the trimmings of the peaches. I don't think my family ever did that; if we skinned the peaches before canning, they went out to the garbage pile. Other critters enjoyed them, but the peach jelly is a great idea to extract extra flavor. We're working our way through a lug of Palisade peaches purchased at the grocery store here in Duluth. They're excellent. I too am trying to remember where Toliver's mother lives, but I can tell you that things have changed drastically in the San Joaquin Valley where Toliver lives now and where I grew up. We used to get wonderful summer fruit either from our own trees or from the produce stands. After I moved out to Minnesota I suffered for several years before discovering a 2-week window when Nectarines That Taste Like They Should would hit the grocery stores here. Since then the season has extended, the occasional Real Peach can also be had (from the SJ Valley)...and none of them seems available in the grocery stores in their home counties. During my last couple of visits 'home' I learned to go to the Farmers' Markets or the neighbors, because the grocery store produce was a bust...and yet, the good stuff from California and Colorado can be had here in northern Minnesota, far from its source. Go figure.

I leave 'em whole. That's part of the charm: they're so easy to prepare this way, and the flavor and texture are still great. Very impressive! Whenever I see something like that, I remember my friend in southern Minnesota who, at the heyday of her farming life, had such a storage area on the bottom floor of her house. A raccoon got in somehow. You can imagine the carnage. Decades later, she still hates raccoons.

"Surface Drag Crab"...sounds to me like the reason boaters and pilots keep their craft clean. Does it refer to dredging the meat in this case?

This is so much fun! I love your attitude about the garden spiders, and I've never seen a zigzag like that. Very cool. I realize now that I've also never seen an eggplant blossom. It's interesting that it looks more classically nightshadesque than the tomato blossoms I see. Re cherry tomatoes: I like to toss them in olive oil, maybe add a sprinkle of salt or herbs, then roast them until they collapse and caramelize slightly. That makes the start of a great pasta sauce, chicken addition or bruschetta topping. Covered with olive oil to keep the air off, it keeps well in the fridge and even better in the freezer. I've never tried canning it.

I am no expert on heirloom tomatoes, so don't let my question dissuade you from thinking those are Brandywines. It was a genuine question. :-) At any rate, your tomatoes look beautiful.

How you're managing to post while all this is going on is beyond me, but I'm glad you're doing it. A couple of comments and a question: Is that gargantuan tomato of this morning a Cherokee Red? I've never thought of including smoked eggplant in a pasta sauce, but I'll bet it's good. Did you strain out the seeds? Finally, I agree that the reason to add acid for canned tomatoes is the lack of natural acid in the newer breeds. When someone tells me 'this is a sweeter, less acid tomato' my mind translates the phrase to 'this tomato has no taste' and I shop elsewhere.

I thought I was an old-timer until this topic! Like Andie, I joined in April 2004. I found eGullet during a fit of pique at the rearrangement (essentially destruction) of the forum associated with The Splendid Table. Kept the friends I'd made there (and still love that radio show) but moved on and made new friends here.

Metric is fine, thanks. I had missed the fact that Mandarin Fish is a species, despite your note at the start. How would you describe it in terms that would help me find a substitute, or is this something that probably wouldn't work with another fish?

"Double Happiness Arrives at the Door" has a lovely poetic lilt! What makes the noise in "Noisy Oil Eel Paste?" Please tell more about the Pineapple Mandarin Fish, when you have the time. That might be something I'd like to try making.